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(Yet) Another Hole in the Head - Satan's Playground
When SFist was in junior high we went with some friends to a movie at the Roxie one day after school. We can't remember what the movie was, but we do remember that for some reason one friend had her pet snake with her. She kept the snake in a pillow case under her seat, and wouldn't you know it, when the film was over the pillow case was there, but the snake wasn't. We looked high and low for that snake, but it never did show up, and we can't help but think of it every time we see a movie at the Roxie. We like to imagine it's still living somewhere in the shadows, and has gotten huge subsisting on Goobers, popcorn, and the occasional rodent.
We were thinking a lot about that snake during the short "Human No More," mainly because the film tested our nerves after the first eight minutes or so, and our minds began to wander. Not much happens in this story of a detective dealing with the grisly murder of his family, but what does happen is, while suitably gory, completely ridiculous. By the end, it all came off as an excuse on the part of the filmmaker to play around with a groovy new lens. To put it bluntly, we hated it.
Once the main feature, Satan's Playground, began, however, the lost snake left our minds (except for a brief moment when a snake appeared in the film. We had to lift out feet off the floor for that scene). Set in a time before cell phones, the plot is your basic horror film cliche: Family on vacation. Car breaks down in the woods. One by one they all leave the safety of the car to try and get help, even though that means wandering into the scary woods, and knocking on the door of a dilapidated house. Which is home to one f**cked up old lady and her two crazy, middle aged kids.
Oh, and the woods are also inhabited by the Jersey Devil.
While the film is indeed rife with the usual horror movie set-ups, it's obvious from the beginning that we're dealing with a horror movie made by a horror movie fan. Director Dante Tomaselli has even gone so far as to cast some horror movie vets, including Edwin Neal from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Ellen Sandweiss from The Evil Dead. Because Tomaselii thinks like a horror movie fan, when he has a character leave the car, enter the woods and yell, "I'll be right back!" he knows the audience is going to laugh. And laugh we do, more than once--this is a really funny horror movie. But the humor also succeeds in putting the audience even more on edge and unlike, say, the Scream movies, Satan's Playground knows how to really creep the audience out in between guffaws. Irma St. Paule's performance as Mrs. Leeds, the scary old lady, sums up the tone of the movie perfectly. She's utterly creepy and totally hilarious.
We were bummed that we had to see a video print of the flick instead of a nice film print. (It was explained to us before the screening started that since the movie hasn't actually been sold for distribution yet, it's staying on video in case whoever buys the movie wants to make some cuts before release. Film prints are expensive, you know.) But we could still tell that Tomaselli knows his stuff. One moment, in which a woman is carried towards what looks like a circular vortex of dead tress, was particularly impressive.
We understand that Satan's Playground may be a little too ridiculous for some people's tastes. You either laugh at the set-up of the ending or come out thinking, "What the hell was the point of that?" But any horror movie that has two completely unrelated damsels-in-distress knocking on the door of the same creepy house in the woods, is all right in our book. And judging from the applause from the festival audience at film's end, we aren't alone in that sentiment.
You can catch "Human No More" and Satan's Playground again at the Roxie on Wednesday, June 8th, at 9:30 p.m.